The Editor:

Citizens and governments don't seem to understand that human property boundaries just don't correspond to anything in nature.

Whether the government's recent response to the North Battleford Water Inquiry is a step in the right direction, remains to be proven.

Water moves down hill on ground surface, vertically from ground surfaces into underground aquifers, and horizontally underground to emerge again in wells, as springs, or into rivers and lakes at lower elevations.

I ask the NDP government:

• Will your regulations apply to industrial, forestry, mining, oil and agricultural activity which impact on the source waters of all watersheds as well as to municipal facilities?



• Many Saskatchewan residents depend on underground aquifers for domestic water. Will you protect the purity of the surface waters that eventually go into the ground and emerge in domestic wells and in streams and lakes? Will you stop the wholesale drainage of surface waters that are needed to recharge the underground reserves?



• When your inspectors find tap water to be unsafe, will you hold to account those responsible for the contamination which may be many miles and many jurisdictions away?



• Will you control your own Crown Corporation, SaskPower, which needlessly destroys forest lands in watersheds near to lakes and homes, and regularly uses powerful chemical agents which destroy surface plant growth and which leach into soil and soil waters? Or do your regulations only apply to municipalities?



• Will you create or finance "Water Keepers" (along the lines described in the Prince Albert Herald article of March 21, www.keeper.org ) with the authority to prosecute and sue both governments and private water polluters?



• Will you revise the Environmental Assessment Act and the Environmental Management and Protection Act to really protect Saskatchewan water, air and land?

Gerald Regnitter at Friendly Forest, Member of Forest Fringe Citizens' Coalition

Box 289, Christopher Lake, Sask.

S0J 0N0

Ph: 306 982-3614, email; friendlyforest@inet2000.com

Web: www.friendlyforest.ca